Sizing Up Murdoch, Redstone and Other Moguls
by ilene - November 4th, 2009 2:19 pm
Sizing Up Murdoch, Redstone and Other Moguls
By Belinda Luscombe, courtesy of TIME

In The Curse of the Mogul, Jonathan Knee, Bruce Greenwald and Ava Seave say the biggest problem with media companies is the moguls, who have been seduced into believing that content is king, bigger is always better and talent — especially their own — is irreplaceable. So blinded are they, they have mismanaged their companies and shareholders have suffered. Co-author Knee, director of the media program at Columbia University and an investment banker with Evercore Partners, weighs in on the next big media deal, the treachery of the Internet and why the movie business sucks.
Is the future of the media smaller?
I hope the future of the media is smarter. The largest media companies are genuinely conglomerates in the old-fashioned sense of the word. They are made up of, in many cases, well over a dozen very different businesses that have nothing to do with each other, and many of those businesses are facing very serious and fundamental threats to their well-being that require significant management attention, and management attention is the most scarce resource at any company. I think the right answer is for these businesses to get more focused. That’s generally the direction that they’re going. Viacom and CBS split up. Time Warner spun off Time Warner Cable and will spin off AOL. This is clearly the trend.
So then, what do you think of the Comcast NBC-Universal Deal?
There are parts of the combination that seem to make obvious sense. Including a bunch of fixed costs that you can spread over a big cable company. However, it is, at a minimum, intriguing that the CEOs of the two leading cable companies in the United States [Comcast and Time Warner Cable] have taken diametrically opposite views on whether it is wise or strategic to invest capital into content businesses. [While Comcast considers merging with a content company,] Glenn Britt, CEO of Time Warner Cable, has said he will not under any circumstances invest any of the company’s quite significant free cash flow into any content businesses. It seems highly unlikely they could both be right.
Your book suggests a lot of the…